


Jacarandas Bloom in the Shade

by Chromat1cs



Category: The Witcher (TV), Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: Adults having messy feelings, All lore magic still applies but now it's Yeehaw Brand (TM) magic, Alternate Universe - Western, American Folklore - Freeform, Campfires, Ciri and Roach are the only ones with their heads on right tbh, Eventual Smut, Geralt and Yen do their thing but don't linger ykwim, Het and Slash, M/M, Mexican Character, Multi, Music, Non-Explicit Sex, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Pining, Roach Ships It (The Witcher), Unproblematic Het Sex, Witchers Have Feelings (The Witcher), Work In Progress
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-23
Updated: 2020-04-01
Packaged: 2021-02-28 20:07:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 10,301
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23272966
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chromat1cs/pseuds/Chromat1cs
Summary: 1880, ass-end of nowhere, West Texas—Geralt finds a man in the dirt, and the prettiest goddamn wrench he’s ever seen (or heard) throws itself into his whole mess all at once.
Relationships: Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Jaskier | Dandelion, Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Yennefer z Vengerbergu | Yennefer of Vengerberg
Comments: 45
Kudos: 76
Collections: Medium Length Works to Read





	1. Late Morning, A Dried-Up Riverbed

**Author's Note:**

> This outline is completed but I can't ignore the compulsion to start posting before I finish prose-ifying this one, I hope you all can abide by a WIP ^^;   
> It should roll out fairly quickly, western AUs always just......spew themselves from my fingertips. And I'm also big-time socially isolating, so hey, what's a gal to do?
> 
> Thanks so much for stopping by, I hope you enjoy the premise as much as my garbage cowpoke brain does~

Geralt has seen a whole score of expressions on people hogtied and left for dead—heaven knows he’s done it enough times to cause some of them himself—but this has to be a first: the poor bastard pinioned to himself in the dirt looks smug as a well-fed rattler.

“Think he killed someone?”

Looking over at Ciri, waist-high and squinting down at the man covered with the red dust of the dried-up riverbed at his back, Geralt tips his head to one side. “What makes you think that?”

She points with one stubby finger, dirt under her nails from the last week-and-a-half spent hoofing it across the wide sprawl of West Texas and stealing sleep where they can get it. “He’s got blood on his shirt, like it sprayed on him.”

“Good eye.” Geralt claps the girl solidly on top of her sun-bleached hat and tips up the dark brim of his own. He fixes the bound-up man with a hard stare, fixing him with the yellow burn of it, and senses only the hammering of the poor bastard’s heart and the helpless seep of his sweat for heat and adrenaline both. No magic, nothing besides his sorry self and the blood drying on his face and the sad-looking scrap of a guitar laying beside him in the noontime sun. Geralt nods at him. “She right?”

The man works dry lips around the dirty rag bound between his teeth as a gag, his tongue pressing at it uselessly as his voice grunts and wheezes for purchase in something almost impressively close to actual speech. Geralt crosses his arms, his pistol holster jangling lightly as he shifts his weight to his other foot. He tips his head back over to Ciri, expectant; “What do you think, should we ungag him?”

A sound very much like _Yes, please_ grunts out from the man on the ground. He bucks slightly against the rope lashing his hands to his feet, his cheek gritted into the clay beneath him, and a bright pair of very blue eyes locks with Geralt’s gaze in a way that makes it seem like he would be spinning up some very colorful phrases if he could actually talk. A very small smile trips onto Geralt’s mouth and he shrugs in mock helplessness.

“I think we should at least ask him what the fuck he’s doin’ out here,” Ciri elects, very solemn with the weight of decision. Geralt sighs thinly.

“Language.”

“Learned it from you.”

“Doesn’t make me feel any better,” Geralt grunts as he lowers himself into a crouch. He props his elbows on his knees and frowns at the bound man. “If I take this gag off, you gotta promise not to hurl any curses at me, alright? I have a faster draw than your tongue could finish, and this one here is feral in a fight.” He jerks a thumb over at Ciri, mirroring his frown with almost chilling accuracy, and flattens his left hand over the revolver at his side with six steel bullets waiting in its chamber. The man’s eyes flick between both indications a few times, not necessarily afraid but alert as alert can be, before he nods. 

Geralt leans forward and picks at the knot at the back of the man’s head with his blunt, callused fingertips until it gives way. He peels it back, tosses it to the ground, and leans back to hear the first sound out of the stranger’s mouth erupt into a parched, dehydrated hack of a laugh.

“What’s so funny?” Ciri demands, her hands on her hips like an animal making itself bigger. The man’s laugh trails off into a dry cough as he tips his face up to the wide basin of endless sky above them and shuts his eyes with a dry-chapped crack-lipped grin.

“I suppose it is fitting,” he wheezes, his voice tinged thick with an accent from much further south, dipping deep down into Mexico with a ladle of a cadence that trips its way out rather than the familiar Texan roll, “that I am both tied-up and then found by a pair of bounty hunters.”

Ciri rests the heel of her hand on the butt of her single holstered pistol, half-counterpoint to Geralt’s two as she still learns how to shoot. “Whose blood’s on your shirt?”

The man looks down and pulls a face before he wrinkles his blood-crusted nose and winces. “Unfortunately it is mine. I look an ugly elbow to the face.”

“Who were the ones that left you here?” Geralt stands up, his knees creaking ever so slightly with the added weight of the protective guards strapped to his shins for today’s job—he and Ciri were out to hunt before this stranger in the dirt stopped them short. The man licks his lips and squints up at Geralt.

“I will answer, but I would like water first, if you please.”

“Don’t do it,” Ciri warns with a slice of her rio-green eyes over at Geralt. “He could be a letiche.”

Geralt shakes his head as he turns to unstrap one of his canteens from Roach’s saddle behind him—she whickers impatiently, the only one among them seemingly intent on the job at hand instead of this bound-and-gagged bravo. “You gotta study more,” Geralt chides with a purposeful look at Ciri. “We ain’t far enough east to run into a letiche.”

An embarrassed flush races up the sun-ruddy skin of Ciri’s neck beneath the cover of her kerchief tied there. “He’s askin’ for water, he might be doin’ it to trick you.”

“Told him already,” Geralt assures her, unscrewing the cap as the man on the ground looks desperately at the movement with a poor attempt at covering it, “I got a draw faster than his tongue if he’s plannin’ on a trick of some sort. _Any_ sort.” He looks hard at the stranger, he best _Listen good, you shit_ stare he usual reserves for the rich folk who pay him to get rid of their own messes. The stranger nods wildly, his dust-mussed wavy brown hair tossing slightly in its messy crop.

“I understand, I only need a drink.”

Geralt crouches again and tips the canteen against the man’s mouth. He lets the three greedy, messy gulps pass—trickle down the corners of his lips, darken the dirt on the sodden linen of his collar—before pulling the canteen back. Geralt ignores the way the man chases the neck of the drink with a twitch of his lips.

“Where you from?” Ever the inquisitor, still practicing the _internal_ part of deduction that witchering entails, Ciri fixes the strangers with her best commanding voice. The man licks the last traces of water from his lips, still looking up at the both of them from his place flat on his side.

“Hidalgo.”

Geralt narrows his eyes. “You a miner?” He doesn’t look anything like the part, far too wiry-solid and unblemished and castizo-fair to be the sort of body that would toil for his bread at the heart of the earth, but Geralt would be remiss not to ask. He’s still teaching after all, and the example for Ciri is worth the time they might very well be wasting here.

As expected, the man snorts. “I come from the stock who _own_ the miners,” he drawls with a bit of sour derision laced up around the words. Geralt doesn’t need to prod, but it’s evidence enough that he isn’t the sort who would have lasted very long out here without the chance meeting at present.

“You’re a long way from there,” Geralt says, still crouched, nipping his own sip from the canteen. He offers it to Ciri and tracks very steadily the way the man doesn’t chase the drink with his eyes the way any other starved-out mouth might. He holds Geralt’s eye contact intently and comfortably, like a man used to uncomfortable conversations.

“I have money,” the man tries, shaking one foot to indicate the muted muffle of gold pieces against his heel. “The stupid _capullos_ who left me here did not even take my shoes like proper thieves.”

“Were they thieves, or bounty hunters?” Ciri cuts in, her reed-scrape of a voice knife-like in the still springtime heat. The man grins.

“Is there any difference?” He looks directly at Geralt as he says it. Geralt redoubles his frown.

“I told you to watch your tongue, hombre.”

Unphased, the man adjusts his shoulders and hunches himself up into a lopsided kneel. “What is your name?”

Geralt grinds his back teeth together and stands, flexing his hand readied unwaveringly over his pistol. “No matter to you.”

“You can call me Jaskier.” The man grins, an irreverent toss of a thing, before he nods over at Ciri. “What did _you_ do to convince this angry creature to bring you along with him from wherever he discovered you?”

Bristling, Geralt takes a single side-step to get Ciri shielded behind his dominant side. “She ain’t your concern.”

The stranger, Jaskier, raises his eyebrows as his face lights up with character like a beacon of humanity such sprawling emptiness. “ _She?_ ” He looks at Geralt, incredulous. “If you cut her hair like that, everyone will think her a boy!”

_Bad move._

“I cut my _own_ hair, you hognose bastard!” Ciri spits, veritable claws out, lunging forward for a well-placed punch or a kick from those bandy legs of hers before Geralt catches her by the collar with an exasperated pinch to his mouth. 

“ _Language,”_ he grits out. Jaskier laughs, in spite of the ropes still lashing him down.

“I like her. I could write a song about her.”

Glancing down to dirt, unable to help himself, Geralt lets out a derisive sound. “With _that?”_

The guitar looks, respectfully, as though it’s seen far better days. Left square on its back like a tiny maw gaping up at the sky in prayer for rain, the wood beneath the strings where fingers have strummed and strummed again is worn through past the varnished butter-brown down to a sappish yellow. The gut strings look more than a little rust-touched, and say nothing of the chipped paint around its edges that was probably once an ivy border of some sort. Jaskier glances down at it as well, smiling on it as though it were his own beloved.

“With that indeed.”

Not buying it, Geralt jerks his chin at the instrument. “How’d _you_ get tied up and left for dead while that...woodchip stayed untouched.”

Jaskier flashes another grin, a sharp wink of a thing, and Geralt feels a slight and sudden twitch in the medallion fixed to its cord slung around his neck. He lets his eyes flick quickly down to Ciri, still silently fuming at the stranger with her arms crossed, and doesn’t feel very much relief when she seems not to have felt anything at all from her own.

“I told my bastard captors that it has old _ticitl_ magic wound into the strings. Made them too afraid to touch it”

Geralt gives him a doubtful, sour look. “And that worked?”

Jaskier’s shoulders twitch as though he might have shrugged had he any range of motion in his arms, a movement that manages to say _See for yourself._ Geralt stares at him until his medallion quits humming; it takes longer than he’s fairly comfortable with.

“Look,” he eventually grits out, releasing Ciri’s collar, suddenly eager to get away from the strange press of this man's presence, “sun’s high, and if we don’t make camp somewhere out of the way by moonrise we’re in for a rougher night than I bargained. I don’t have time to waste here.”

Making to leave, Geralt fixes his canteen back to Roach’s saddle and nods at Ciri to mount her pony. He turns away from the stranger, _Jaskier,_ a bloom of a name as out-of-place and colorful as someone so unexpected in the middle of—

_“Wait.”_

Geralt freezes.

Geralt _never_ freezes.

Taking one breath, two, he turns very slowly on his heel—dirt grinding beneath his boot sole, spurs rattling ever so faintly—and fixes Jaskier with a stone-hard stare. _“What.”_

“You are looking for Horned Jack, are you not?”

Slowly, every so slowly, Geralt lowers himself back into a crouch to match eye level with this bottle-glass shard of a man, shining in the daylight like some crude edge left waiting for a finger to cut itself on its sharpness. _Horned Jack_ indeed, the contract he and Ciri have been tracking for the last nine days—fuck-off creature of a thing, monstrous jackrabbit with its antlers big as anything, tall as a man and just as dangerous too if it’s in the wrong mood and bares those razor teeth. The sheriff back in town saddled Geralt with the contract, and he’ll be damned if he doesn’t come back with it finished in one clean shot between the eyes. A man needs to eat. Ciri has a handful of others who would see her cared for, but Geralt never trusts anything but his work to get a meal in his belly and a bed under his back when push comes to shove. 

Geralt’s voice is low, steady, the whisper of a threat as a blade pulling slowly from its sheath; “And just how d’you figure that?”

“You have guards on your legs,” Jaskier replies, just as low, just as gently, a touch of jest sewn into it with the way he looks proud of himself as he says it. “Those are stovepipes, no?”

Geralt narrows his eyes. “And if they are?”

“Then your kind all take the same precautions, I have seen this in México." Jaskier tips his head back to indicate his feet, an infuriating lock of hair tripping down over one eye with the movement. "Check my left boot. Not the one with the gold inside, the other one.”

The strange, tenuous tenison spun like spider’s silk between them breaks suddenly as Ciri snorts from behind them. “You keepin’ a bank in between your toes, or what?”

“Ciri, _hush,”_ Geralt barks over his shoulder before turning immediately back to Jaskier. Unceremoniously, he shifts behind the stranger and pulls off his left boot in two tugs. A tin flask, tooled with intricate etchings across its surface clatters to the ground. Geralt looks up to see Jaskier grinning at him over his shoulder, a terribly dangerous grin with such self-assuredness for one still pinioned hands-to-shins. “What’s this have to do with—”

“You look like a man who believes in legends,” Jaskier interrupts smoothly, and Geralt already knows with a frustrating twist to his gut that he’s going to relent and take this bravo along with them before he’s even done gloating. “They say Horned Jack will do _anything_ for a nip of whiskey. The flask is yours if you cut me free. Do we have a deal, _brujo_?”


	2. Night, at Camp Near a Scrub-Dust Treeline

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Music is as music does, and Geralt doesn't quite care to examine exactly why.

Night in the desert is easily Geralt's favorite time and place out of the vast swaths of traveling that have passed under his well-worn snakeskin boots. The borders of his perception seem to stretch out for miles with it, his hearing and smell and sight compounded in the dark and the quiet attended only by the chittering sounds of insects in the low brush and the occasional laugh of a coyote somewhere far away. 

That is, _usually_ it's a time for peace and recentering after a long day in the heat and sweat of a job well done. At present, the addition of a mouthy attache has all but twisted the silence into something far too bright and unfamiliar here around the fire. 

"Tell me about your pistols, _brujo_ , if you please."

Jaskier say it fairly softly but the sound still manages to grate against Geralt's need for absolute quiet when he stands watch over Ciri's sleep like this—the girl usually sleeps soundly, but occasionally out here in the arid wilds she has night terrors that have caused dust cyclones and even attracted packs of hungry creatures to her like a carrion beacon. Geralt grunts. "What's there to tell?"

"You carry two," Jaskier hums, nipping from the extra water canteen Geralt let him have instead of empty flask sucked dry by Horned Jack several hours back, "and yet I only watched you shoot one at our unfortunate bedfellow."

He nods over to Roach, nibbling a knob of weeds where she's been tied to a low desert Willow branch, to indicate the grotesque cargo wrapped in dirty linens and hitched to the back of her saddle: Horned Jack’s head, antlers and all, twisted into his final horrified grimace and still oozing faintly from the bloody stump where the sinewy thick of his neck parted to the blade of Geralt’s hunting knife after collapsing from the single silver bullet between his eyes.

Geralt prods the fire with the branch by his feet and stares into the flames for a moment, watching them hiss as the logs shift. “Silver for monsters—” He pats his left holster without looking at it, and then his right. “—steel for humans.”

Whistling low, a surprisingly melodic sound in the wastes of the desert, Jaskier leans back onto his elbows and crossed his ankles long in front of him—a free man splaying out, taking up his space, loosed from his bonds with a clean slice of that very same hunting knife that sealed the fate of a monster. “I thought _I_ was unnecessarily poetic.”

Annoyance digs faintly at a space just behind Geralt’s breastbone, a space where he usually feels the metallic prickle of magic before his medallion can even begin humming but this isn’t magic—this is some sort of disquiet, a rattling unsurety in his marrow that he can’t for the life of him place. Geralt dances around it, deflects instead to the stranger, Jaskier; “What are you doin’ this far north anyways?”

Jaskier shrugs, his head lolling to bring his ear close to his shoulder as though tipping over drunk despite stone-cold sobriety. He looks careless, effortless, in a way that Geralt realizes with abashed frustration makes him very vaguely jealous. “Can a man long used to a life of hedonism not look for more of the same in a different place?”

Geralt narrows his eyes. “Seems unlikely a simple hedonist would be roughed, bound, and gagged for it.”

A bitter twitch of a smile steals one corner of Jaskier’s mouth at that, a wounded sort of look Geralt has seen before in jackrabbits he’s snared that says _Fine, you caught me._ Jaskier takes his own turn staring into the licking crackle of the fire for several moments before he sighs lightly to himself. “I am looking for an old friend, a musician very similar to myself. She is...further north.”

“Where, Colorado? Montana?”

“You speak as though I know anything of this country.”

“ _You_ speak fine enough English to fool me.”

“I was educated to confer with merchants and nobles in Queen’s English, none of the flayed _enredo_ you two are flinging between one another.” Jaskier gestures loosely between Geralt and the small bundle of Ciri tucked into her bedroll. Geralt narrows his eyes and glares, doing his best to see all the way down to what makes this stranger tick. All he comes up with is an even heartbeat and the lingering notes of a scent just sweet enough to make Geralt wish he had something else at hand to distract himself from the conversation. As ever, the night offers nothing but impenetrable dark and the distant echoes of the unknown.

“I saved your ass from baking to ashes out there,” Geralt growls, “I’m surprised someone raised up on Queen’s fuckin' English won’t even give me the courtesy of your friend’s name.”

Jaskier inspects his fingernails, a farce of a thing with his general dust-blown state leftover from that afternoon and no chance to clean up since. “I am surprised you expect me to follow you long enough to even need her name, nonetheless to get to where we might even begin looking for her.”

“It’s basic respect. But I guess I shouldn’t expect much from you.” Geralt gives him a dry once-over, and for some reason it’s that which sends a bolt of something sharp and antagonistic through Jaskier’s veins beneath Geralt’s second sight. It’s gone almost as soon as it arrived, but undeniably its traces linger. Geralt holds his stare, ether-bright, and doesn’t blink first.

“A name is a powerful thing,” Jaskier settles for saying, tossing it out fussily as he readjusts and pulls himself up in a proper sit. Geralt rolls his eyes and takes his own flask out from his shirt pocket.

“I’ve heard that one up and down ‘til Sunday.”

“And you talk of _courtesy,_ I still don’t even know yours.”

Geralt swigs a sip, lets it bite across his gums, frowns at Jaskier across the fire. “My what?”

“Your name.”

Frustration strikes in him like a match before he can catch himself to seal off his teeth to it; “Geralt.”

Jaskier is quiet for a blessed moment, as though he’s tasting the name in his head before he smiles—the glow of the fire lights his face with its raw wash, cutting sharp along the angles of his nose, chin, mouth; “Geralt,” he says with that accent like a cane tapping softly against a wooden floor, “pleased to meet you, Geralt.” He looks back into the fire and runs the tip of his tongue steadily along the line of his top teeth—white teeth, straight teeth, a rich man's teeth, Geralt has seen that smile before. Jaskier takes his sweet time as Geralt silently, obstinately, watches his thoughts churn along behind those gulf-blue eyes. 

"The girl," he finally hums, "she's yours?"

Geralt takes another slow nip from his flask and rolls it around over the flats of his tongue and the crags of his own teeth. He shrugs. "Technically."

"What, you 'technically' shoved your cock somewhere and found her wailing at you in a poor whore’s arms next time you stumbled through town?"

"I _technically_ hunted a contract from the Comanche ‘round these parts—some devil of a first water fucker with a mind to up and kill the folks who told him the land he was stealin' was sacred—and found her hiding in the cupboard of the old bastard's house before I burnt it to the ground." Geralt doesn't blink as he stares hard at Jaskier, lances the glare of his own sharp eyes into that jesterly glitter across from him, and takes a pause before he settles just a little against his lean on the scrubby desert tree behind him. "So yes. She's mine."

Jaskier yawns wide as the fire pops, cracking in the same cadence as his jaw around the exaggerated stretch, and Geralt only lets his eyes flick down just a whit to the space where Jaskier's shirt rides up just so over the hem of his trousers. He takes another drink.

“Are you training her?” Jaskier asks through the strain of his stretch. He must be exhausted, Geralt realizes for the first time—it’s hard for him to remember that others aren’t so blind to the ache and pain of the desert trails, more delicate beneath the glare of the sun and the bite of the dirt. Ciri has learned to just grit her teeth and bare it, understand that where there’s a job worth tracking there’s coin and bread on the other end of it regardless of the grit it takes to get there.

“How, to be like me?”

Geralt stops himself, the flask halfway to his mouth. He’s surprised, faintly, at the bitterness in his voice sprung up like a lurid bloom of blood on cloth around the parting kiss of knifepoint. The tang of self-loathing is one he tastes all too often, the bite of steel between his teeth when he least expects it.

“It would be a noble pursuit,” Jaskier hums, either ignoring or forgetting to hear the sour cant of Geralt’s growl, “teaching a girl how to hunt everyone else’s monsters.”

Jaskier looks at Geralt for a long time, through the length of two more sips of whiskey. Geralt doesn’t offer any up to him. Jaskier leans over onto one of his elbows, carefully, stretching out onto his side. “She watches the world around her like a mountain cat.”

It seems the man is content enough to fill the space with his own idle chatter if sleep won’t take him, so Geralt holds in a weary sigh and relents to conversation.”What does that have to do with anything?”

"Well, you watch me like a wolf." It's a calm tone of voice, but Geralt is sensitive enough to the contour of anxious intrigue. Jaskier nods at him with his chin and smirks. "You look like you could kill a man with one blink."

"You say that like it ain't true," Geralt murmurs. He offsets it with the twitch of his own half-smile, if only to assuage both the flutter of fear in Jaskier's gaze and the tremor of reaching curiosity for this faraway stranger at the pit of his belly. "Don't worry though, not men like you. Just monsters."

"Whose monsters though?" Holding his look with impressive surety, Jaskier gestures up at the sky beyond them with his canteen as though indicating the wide sprawl of the native land spinning out around them like the thousands of stars glimmering down above. "Yours, or theirs?"

Geralt tightens his grip on the worn leather of his flask and decides very suddenly that spending time around this man will be a gamble with every thread of his being. He takes another drink and tosses a handful of fodder onto the fire, adjusting his hat to hide the way he fears his eyes might betray the buckling stays around his heart. "You decide, muchacho."

They sit in more silence for a stretch of time that just barely starts feeling like comfort wrapped around Geralt’s bones, but of course Fate can’t be trusted to give Geralt anything for very long that even smells like comfort—Jaskier sits back up, reaches behind him, and situates his guitar on his knee. Geralt drums up a flagrant ribbon of profanities in his ribs, buzzing and stinging there like a hornet’s nest, and he’s just about ready to fling his flask at Jaskier after the musical idiot spends far too long twanging and twisting his strings in soft tuning when Jaskier props the instrument up on his knee, tips his face up to the moonlight, and begins to play.

It’s as though a calming spell flows from the hollow of the ancient-looking guitar, wrapping around Geralt and squeezing him gently around all his roughest edges. Geralt clenches his fingers around his flask and sets his jaw, staring deep into the heart of the fire, and can’t seem to attach his ears to anything besides the winding stream of the tune Jaskier is summoning up with every gentle pluck and strum. From the corner of his eye, Geralt watches Jaskier’s fretting hand—the curves of his fingers, in pacifistic counterpoint to the shapes Geralt makes around his own roughened palms to summon power and ruin from the ether, bending and stretching like runic blessings dancing along the soft thrum of music pushing and pulling the air to suss its sweetness up into the night; Geralt swallows, caps his flask, and redoubles his fixation on the campfire as he listens. It reminds him, strangely, of home. Geralt has long forgotten about things like home.

“Where’d you get that scrap of wood anyway?” Geralt grunts, shoving down the ebbing thread of emotions his sort isn’t even supposed to feel after the Trail pushed and warped his being into what he is now—strong, stoic, savvy. He chances a glance up at Jaskier and immediately regrets it when he sees the bright-eyed stare fixed on him like torchlight—is he about to drum up another one of his half-truths?

“I outsmarted the god Xipe Totec. He gave me his _guitarra_ as my prize.”

Geralt frowns. _Definitely lying._ Nothing out of this man’s mouth is rooted in any sort of honesty, is it? “What about the tic-i-til magic?” He asks, Jaskier’s mother tongue sluicing unevenly off of Geralt’s own.

“Oh, yes,” Jaskier says with a grin, tossing his hair lightly as he tips his head to the side without a care in the dry, bloodless, unforgiving world, “her too.”

 _What a fuckin’ piece of horseshit you are._ Geralt snorts, prepared to turn around and ignore the idle plucking—no matter how sweet it might sound despite Geralt’s resistance—to get some goddamn peace in meditation, but he freezes.

For the second time in less than a day, for the same bravo apparently intent on turning Geralt’s entire fucking existence on its head.

Jaskier begins to sing and the night seems to stop in one slow, silent gasp.

_“Guarda tu espada  
Querido cazador,  
Y siéntate conmigo aquí, _

_Abraza mi cintura  
Querido cazador,  
Y vierte tu aliento sobre mí…” _

Clenching one fist, breathing intently through his nose, Geralt feels his heart pulling sharply as though trying to leap from his chest, throw itself onto the fire and burn to soot instead of weather the buffeting beauty of Jaskier’s voice in a language Geralt will never understand beyond the angles of vague translation—and what’s the intent here, anyways? For Jaskier to calm himself after a hard-won day? For him to lull Geralt in a sort of stupor and then, what, scurry off into the night with his ammo, or his money, or worse-yet, Ciri? But no; Geralt finds the courage he can scrape as easily as muck from his boots in order to face down monsters but suddenly feels harder to dredge up than an iron stone from a lake and look up at Jaskier. His eyes are dancing, blue as white-flame, and his smile is knowing in a way Geralt can’t find the patience to parse. _Listen,_ that look seems to say, _look at me._

Geralt doesn’t look away, doesn’t blink, and continues to listen.

_“Mira las flores  
Y los árboles en flor  
Desafiandonos, mi cazador; _

_Los lirios se abren  
En la noche de tus ojos _

_Y jacarandas,  
que florecen a la sombra...” _

He feels it again then, that leeching sense of home, home, _home;_ the song smacks of it, of those redolent jacaranda trees and the Ahuehuete bark of which Geralt has only heard stories from other travelers or hunters or witchers but can somehow smell and feel now in his deepest reaches. His senses were wrong, he thinks wildly; Jaskier possesses magic, and the strangest sort at that—magic borne from the mundane, imbued with touching power through nothing but the strength of a stubborn spirit, dangerous in the wrong hands.

 _Are these the wrong hands,_ Geralt things distantly, letting the song press gently against the edges of his skull, _or the right ones?_

It rattles him ever so slightly, rattles a man used to staring down creatures six times his size and twice as deadly, and he decides the only sane course of action is to turn away from it.

Geralt rolls over as Jaskier continues to sing, spinning his tune up into the night, and pretends to shut his eyes. He says nothing, still listening, but finally lets his brow soften and his face relent to smoothing its frown in the guarding touch of the dark.

_“Muéstrame tu alma  
A través de tu toque’n mí, _

_Cuéntame tus gustos  
Por tu lengua sobre mí, _

_Te diré:_

_Las lilas se abren  
En la noche de tus ojos _

_Y jacarandas,  
que florecen a la sombra…” _


	3. Afternoon, Roosting in Marfa

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A rest, and some riling all at once for good measure.

Marfa. If there was ever a place that could be considered any sort of oasis in the far end of Texas’ hat tip, it’s Marfa. Though instead of water and rest, one could more easily find piss-taste beer and a quick fuck at The Lodge—regardless, it's a different sort of better than hoofing it out in the wastes. 

Striding through the first sense of civilization he and Ciri have seen in weeks, Geralt holds Roach’s reins in one hand and Ciri’s pony in the other. The girl has stayed in her saddle and Jaskier brings up the rear behind them, sauntering as best he can to cover the stumbles that trip into his stride every so often—he slept hard, once he got to quitting those songs of his, and stayed deep in dreams until Ciri asked if she could wake him up in order to make it back to town in enough time. After Geralt nodded permission, she had dumped the dregs of her canteen on the stranger and called him a princess. It had taken the lion’s share of Geralt’s willpower to keep from smiling as Jaskier squawked awake.

_ You’ll dry off in the sun, quit cryin’, _ Ciri had insisted.

_ It is the principle of the thing! _ Jaskier replied as he shook out his hair, pawing uselessly at the wet patch on the front of his shirt mixing in with the dirt and the dried blood. Ciri had rolled her eyes as Geralt felt a funny mixture of pride and self-awareness well up inside him.

_ The ‘principle of the thing,’ _ she shot back with a very well-mocked pitch of Jaskier’s accent right back at him,  _ is that we gotta get back to town before the sheriff’s office shuts. Now come on, day’s burnin’. _

“Wait here,” Geralt orders as they pull up to a stop before the adobe flat of the town hall, Sheriff Strenger’s perch in the parched pocket of the little town. He nods at Jaskier and hands off the reins to Ciri as she swings down easily from her pony’s saddle. “Tie up and wait with him.”

“Can’t I come in with you?” Ciri whines a little as she takes the reins, glaring a little over Geralt’s shoulder. Geralt fixes her with a steady look.

“What’d I tell you about whining?”

Kicking at the dirt with her toe, Ciri glares at the ground. “Not to do it.”

Geralt tips his face down to catch hers, his eyes still sharp and instructive. “What was that?”

“Not to  _ do it,” _ Ciri crows more clearly, exasperated with obedience. Geralt straightens up and ruffles her hat.

“That’s right. I’ll just be a minute now.”

Jaskier taps him on the shoulder before Geralt can turn, and despite his senses being aware of the approach Geralt still feels a small bolt of frisson skitter through him at the touch. He turns to face Jaskier with a small frown. “What.”

“Might I stop in somewhere for a dr—”

_ “No. _ You wait with her, and she gives a hell of a warning shot if you scamper. Got it?” Geralt points at Ciri without looking away from Jaskier, holding his attention with an iron grip, and Jaskier raises his eyebrows.

“I am not trying to run, I am only thirsty.”

Still not looking away, Geralt shrugs off and pushes his own canteen into Jaskier’s hands. “Unless you’d rather Ciri served you again?” 

Narrowing his eyes, Jaskier takes the canteen and unscrews it slowly. He takes a long gulp, staring Geralt down as he goes. “No, thank you,” he says lightly when he scrubs the back of his hand across his mouth, bitter but clearly getting the message. “The minor drowning from this morning was plenty.”

It isn’t that Geralt doesn’t trust the stranger—his trust is a rare thing, given only to a choice few people who have proven in their own way that Geralt can rest assured they won’t bury a knife in his back when he least expects it. It’s simply that Geralt has heard a hundred different variants of  _ I’m looking for a friend  _ that have always resulted in someone getting double-crossed, mangled by a monster, or turning sharply on Geralt’s reluctant extensions of goodwill, and Geralt can’t prove yet that Jaskier doesn’t have a cadre of desperados hunkered somewhere here ready to hold him up for all the gold he’s worth. Or worse, yet again, Ciri herself.

“Shoot first if he tries anything on you,” Geralt mutters, taking stock of the empty late-afternoon streets and cataloguing immediately six different ways out should he need to track Ciri’s chase. “Holler if anything goes funny.”

Ciri tips her hat at him. “Like a goddamn banshee.”

Sighing and gritting his teeth as he hefts Horned Jack’s wrapped-up head from Roach’s saddle pack, Geralt shakes his head to himself.  _ “Language.”  _

He doesn’t wait around to decipher what it is Ciri grumbles at him, already legging up into Strenger’s office with his spurs rattling and his boots thudding against the wooden steps with portentous weight.

The stone floor of the town hall rings beneath Geralt’s stride, and the deputy stumbles a little into a stand as Geralt moves to blow straight past his rickety desk and into the shut door to see the sheriff.

“He—the sheriff is busy right n—”

“Too busy to pay what he owes?” Geralt growls. The deputy pales a little, his blood speeding up in his veins as Geralt pauses and takes stock of his fear to see it shimmer through the sallow man’s body.

“He can see you tomorrow, he—”

“I’ve got dues to pay  _ today, _ son, so I think he’ll see me now, thanks kindly.”

Despite the deputy’s small sound of resistance, Geralt slams into the office without ceremony and darkens the doorway with all the heft and glower he musters when he collects from a difficult payor. Someone shrieks ungracefully, either the sheriff or the woman bent over this lap on her knees beside his chair, and the sheriff clamors to stand up and refasten his trousers all in one motion. It doesn’t go very smoothly.

“Strenger,” Geralt says, cold and calculated. The poor girl fussing to fix her hair and wipe tidily at the corners of her mouth, left to fend for herself by the side of Strenger’s desk, refuses to meet his eyes and flushes a dark red. Geralt tips his hat anyways. “Ma’am.”

“What the hell do you think you’re on about, crashin’ in like that!” Strenger roars, red as a beet. “I could have been havin’ an important meeting!”

Geralt raises his eyebrows. “Is that sheriff’s code for gettin’ your cock sucked? ‘Cause you were.”

The sheriff sputters and the girl makes an embarrassed sound and hides her face in her hands before quickly darting forward and lightly—fearfully, as though she might catch something if she touches him—slipping past Geralt and out the door. A pang of hurt spikes into Geralt’s gut, ephemeral as a puff of wind on a still day but making itself felt nonetheless. He turns back to Strenger after a moment, once the man has himself tucked back in properly. A furious flush still stains the man’s blotchy face, plagued by drunkenness and other rheumy affects from a life spent in excess beyond his office.

“I won’t glorify that with an answer,” Strenger says loftily, mopping one side of his brow with a handkerchief he stuffs back into his pocket hastily. “Now  _ what _ is so important that you couldn’t come back later, witcher?”

Unceremoniously, Geralt tears the wrappings away from Horned Jack’s head and slams it down on Strenger’s desk in one fell swoop. A pencil and a photograph frame clatter to the ground with it as Strenger yelps, jumping back from the grotesquerie with his pudgy hands up as though the beast might come back to life and snap at him with those massive, gnarled rodent’s teeth. The antlers prong into the air with rude violence, accenting the stench and the thick spatter of the coagulated blood that sprays with a wet slap over the empty, polished desktop.

“Contract’s done,” Geralt snarls. “Pay up.”

Strenger balls his fists at his side, still seething from several paces back. “This could have  _ waited!” _

“Like I told your deputy, I have dues need payin’ today.” Geralt’s hand is still fisted in the stiff fur at the crown of Horned Jack’s head, and he twists it just so to face Strenger as though mirroring his own grimace.  _ Fuckin’ Christ,  _ Geralt hates squeezing his money out of Strenger. “So either cough up, or I’ll quit takin’ your jobs and leave the whole fuckin’ town to deal with the monsters on your own.”

It’s a lie. He won’t—there are people he cares about a bit too much rooted down here, and Geralt will take any and all money he can scrape up from work despite how hard it can grate on his patience nowadays—but Strenger doesn’t have to know that.

“H—how much was it, again?” Strenger stammers. Geralt hardens his frown and rips the contract out of his back pocket with his free hand. It’s creased and worn from the near-fortnight out in the wastes, but Strenger’s signature and the agreed-upon amount is clear as day at the bottom of the note: forty dollars. 

"I prefer gold pieces, but bank notes will also do the trick," Geralt reiterates, hashing his own fine print back out at Strenger as though they're back in this same office five weeks back— _ A devil of a thing, that beast, _ Strenger had blustered on, staring out the window, and Geralt had felt a very strange but familiar sense of disconnect at whether the sheriff was talking about Horned Jack or Geralt himself. 

"Forty dollars is a mite steep, ain't it?" Strenger fusses with his lapels, dusty with summer's bleaching and patching around their edges. Geralt glares. 

"You already signed the goddamn contract, Strenger. Pay up."

Reaching down to fiddle with the chain of his pocketwatch tucked into the breast pocket of his keggish chest, Strenger continues to make no movement to reach into the treasury box Geralt knows sits in a safe beneath his desk. "Now, hear me out; ours is a small town, you know, and we—"

In a flash, Geralt has his hunting knife drawn and held a hair away from Strenger's jowls. The sheriff pales, lets out a laughably weak little wheeze, and goes quiet.

"I don't take kindly," Geralt hisses, "to bein' told my work ain't worth its salt. If you're keen to go out there and stumble around in the sun until you find one of these bastards, be my guest." He gestures sharply with Horned Jack's head, making Strenger jump. Sweat stands out with a pink glisten on the sheriff's forehead, his eyes wide and fish-like. "But when you get gutted from tip to fuckin' tail, don't come cryin' back to me about takin' care of the problem. If you can't pay me,  _ don't fuckin' hire me." _

Exhausted by his own theatrics, Geralt lowers his knife as Strenger clutches at his throat and sucks on air as though Geralt had been choking him. Who knows; the ether tends to do strange things when Geralt gets to doubling down on the worst sort of men. "Right then," Strenger wheezes, looking between Geralt and the dead creature as though they've become one and the same. "Forty dollars."

Five minutes later, bank notes folded in one fist, Geralt strides out of the town hall with a frown that feels carved into his face by now. Horned Jack, left on Strenger's desk staring up at the bastard with its death-blackened tongue out and all, is no longer his fucking problem. 

"Let's go," he growls, taking Roach's reins from Ciri and heading straight for The Lodge. He needs a goddamn drink. 

The red doorpost, in bad need of a fresh coat of paint, may as well be a beacon shining down from holiness on high at the edge of town. Geralt gives the last of his paltry coin to the young man—a twig of a kid, no older than Ciri and ganglier to boot—who scrambles away from his poorly-covered peek into the dusty side window to flush bright pink and doff his patched hat with one hand.

“Board yer horses?” he croaks, voice cracking between octaves, and Geralt almost feels a flutter of sympathy for the blind wreck of adolescence as he hands over Roach and the pony’s reins.

Geralt removes his gloves and tucks them into his holster belt as he flexes his fingers absently without the clutch of tired leather wrapped around them. “No board for the mare, thanks, just tie her. I won’t be long. Keep the extra.” He nods over his shoulder at Ciri and Jaskier, both of them looking varying degrees of eager to get the hell inside under a roof. “Come on.”

The tinny wheeze of the old player piano in the back corner of the barroom does a very strange thing to Geralt’s guts that might very well be called comfort, if one looked at it just so. Geralt removes his hat and shakes a hand through his hair— _ Goddammit, _ he needs a bath. He flicks gently at the brim of Ciri’s hat to remind her to take hers off as well just as a veritable corsair of skirts appears in his periphery right behind the sharp scent of sandalwood on the air.

“Welcome back, Geralt, what a pleasure to see you and your...entourage.”

She doesn’t sound welcoming or pleased in the slightest. Geralt turns to face her with a bland smile. “Afternoon, Philippa.”

Philippa Eilhart is looking at Geralt as though he’s come in scraped off the back sole of someone else’s boot, which is far from out of the ordinary. Her arms are crossed over the stately, overdone lacework at the very low cut of her bodice—the dress cutting such a handsome harmony with the body bared beneath it, the woman herself half-Native with deep skin perfectly clear and unlined even as she glares at Geralt for all he’s worth, that one might miss the fact she’s got a beaded eyepatch fixed around the left side of her face.

“Will you and your  _ friend,” _ she spits with perfect cordiality, barely lifting a glance for Jaskier but making him jump as though she’d pointed her one good eye, sharp and dark as obsidian, directly at him, “be seeking any of our many comforts today?”

“A stiff drink.” Geralt smiles a smile that doesn’t reach anywhere close to his eyes, immune to Philippa’s venom after years of weathering it. She built The Lodge from the ground up—drifted into town in her nightdress all those years ago with a bloody scrap of cloth, as the story goes, bound over the hole of her eye socket and a dead man’s purse in hand.  _ That building on the far end of town, is it empty? _ Philippa had demanded, at the same time she hefted the sack of gold onto the mayor’s desk.  _ I take it, by the way you’re slaverin’ over even a bloodied tramp, _ she continued with a raptor’s smile, catching the mayor’s sightline over her breasts like an owl snatching up a field mouse,  _ you’re in sore need of a good whorehouse. _

“Is that Cirilla I see over there?”

_ Now  _ Geralt’s heart pulls, well and earnestly; despite himself, he turns to face the creaky switchback staircase on the other end of the room. Yennefer descends, dark hair piled atop her head and face painted immaculately fair, and stops at the foot at the steps with her arms held wide. Not waiting for Geralt’s go-ahead, Ciri drops her hat to the floor and races into the embrace as though the dirt and weather smeared all over her doesn’t matter in the slightest. Yennefer hugs her with the exact same fervor, smiling a rare sort of smile at the reunion that makes Geralt bite down hard on his back teeth to keep from smiling.

“You’re squeezin’ the lights out of me, little one, you just saw me a month ago!” Yennefer pulls back, her hands on Ciri’s shoulders, still crouched to match their sightlines.

“Well it felt like ages!” Ciri cries, throwing her hands into the air before she paws the ashen flyaway hair back from her forehead with excited fervor. “Yen, it was the  _ best. _ We slept on the dirt, I got to kick Pony up to a gallop a few times, Geralt killed Horned Jack with  _ one shot, _ you should have seen it!”

Geralt starts, just a bit, when Yen looks up and catches his eye over Ciri’s shoulder. There’s a little glimmer in her gaze, something that says  _ Oh, I’ve missed you. _ “Did he really?” she hums, and she opens her mouth again to say something else but stops when her eyebrows go up as she notices Jaskier. Narrowing his eyes, Geralt catches the tang of recognition that flutters through the air and looks between Yennefer and Jaskier. “What,” he mutters, “you two know each other?”

Before he can reply, his expression dancing with flippancy, Jaskier glances up at the top of the staircase and breaks into abject mirth with a wide grin. Geralt looks too, wondering how in the hell a dandy from Hidalgo would know a wag-tail in Marfa, and his stomach drops. He spins on his heel as though blaming Jaskier for the connection; “You know  _ Triss?” _

“No how in  _ hell,” _ Triss Merigold sings from the top of the staircase, loping down in her shift and a loosened waistcoat instead of her on-the-clock skirts Geralt knows with more familiarity than he would care to admit in front of Yennefer, “does a thing like you run all the way up here, and get attached to a dog like that?”

Triss pushes past Geralt smoothly and embraces Jaskier for some time, still smiling, before she turns and fixes Geralt with a sharp slap. The  _ thwak _ of it rings faintly through the whorehouse, scoring the merry canter of the player piano. None of the other women draped around the mid-afternoon lull of the place look up at the sound.

“Afternoon, Triss,” Geralt growls, refusing to nurse his cheeks as it stings mightily. He doesn’t look over at Ciri and Yen, but he can tell Ciri is watching with poorly-reined glee.

“Afternoon, Geralt.” Triss pats him twice on the abused cheek. He just barely stays from wincing. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

“Finished a contract for your swine of a sheriff, tomorrow I’m headed up north to check on some other jobs.” Nodding over at Ciri, Geralt sighs lightly to himself. “And last month, Yen said you all were fixin’ to take Ciri east for that theurgist gathering...thing, whatever it is you’re up to, so I’m droppin’ her off.”

“Speaking of which,” Philippa cuts in smoothly, her head tipped to one side and her hands on her hips now, “we were promised payment for that passage, weren’t we?”

Pinching his lips together sourly, Geralt pulls out the fold of bank notes from his back pocket and splits the stack in half with a quick flick of his fingers. He extends one half to Philppa, held between his fore and middle fingers. “Count it.”

Mollified, Phillpa snaps up the bills with a delicate pluck and moves off behind the bar where the heavy safe sits in her madame’s office. Geralt turns back to Jaskier, still frowning, and jerks his head at Triss. “Now how in  _ hell _ do you two know each other?”

“Whatever did you find the time to do to make her so  _ angry?” _ Jaskier asks instead, looking amusedly in awe of the dynamic unfolding before him.

“What hasn’t he done?” Triss springs in before Geralt can shut down the inquiry, crossing her arms and looking Geralt up and down like an ornery horse. “Most recently though, last time he fucked me he said the wrong name when he finished.”

Geralt bristles, embarrassment covered over as ever by fury; so the hell what if he’d mixed up his passions in the heat of a fuck? It wasn’t as though he’d invented the gaffe and it was very easy, he’d found as of late and especially in long spells away from her, to mistake any body wrapped up in his own for the long, pliant stretch of Yennefer. “Watch it, Triss, there’s a kid o—”

“Am not!” Ciri cries, pointing a stubby finger at Triss. “She told me last summer that I’m a woman now, didn’t you, Triss?”

“Yes you are, little bird,” Triss crows in response, victorious, still looking straight at Geralt with that honey-sick-sweet smile, “but don’t fault Geralt for forgetting it. He still needs some learnin’ where women are concerned.”

“How. The hell. Are you two familiar,” Geralt repeats steadily. He fixes Jaskier with the brunt of his glare this time, and to his chagrin Jaskier shrugs it off with a flat wave of his hand.

“Dama Marigold worked for a duke in Hidalgo some years ago.” Leaning over to prop himself on Triss’ shoulder like some kind of old friend, Jaskier rhapsodizes on; “We kept one another sane at the parties the old  _ tonto _ threw any chance he could get.”

Triss snorts. “You kept yourself sane by chasing tail.  _ I _ made sure you didn’t lose your gear for it.” She grabs between her legs with a casual toss of her wrist, which makes Jaskier laugh and Geralt seethe just under his skin—Triss is, has always been, good at crawling right up under the gaps in Geralt’s defenses and itching until she burns him. He should never have started fucking her. But raising a kid in the middle of nowhere is lonely, and Yen doesn’t tend to orbit town as often as she used to when Ciri first came into Geralt’s protection, so it was difficult to say no to Triss. It  _ is _ difficult to say no to Triss.

She catches Geralt looking at her, vexed and fairly lost in thought, and tips her head to one side. “Sorry, asshole, not today. I’m on my monthly.”

Geralt refuses to keep feeding that lede, so he turns to make a strong gesture at the barman for that drink he’s been craving. 

Jaskier picks up the conversation as though it never skipped in the first place, effortless as a sigh; “ _ Estoy en su deuda, rojita. _ Now, how about a good strong drink?” He steers Triss by the shoulder to the opposite corner of the bar, giving Geralt a brief look that says something there in the deep blue of it but passes too quickly to parse. “I hear your American tequila is like horse piss.”

Throwing back her head to laugh, the great tumble of her curling hair bouncing softly, Triss follows willingly. “Maybe elsewhere, but here it’s all from down south anyways. You’ll feel right at home, Dandelion. Oh, and after you have a bath? I’ll introduce you to Margarita.”

Geralt shuts his eyes and lets out a slow, controlled breath through his nose. The barman slides the double pour of dry whiskey in front of him, and Geralt is looking forward to shutting the rest of the room out and enjoying a drink that doesn’t come from inside his sun-baked flask for the first time in an age— _ Shit. _ Yen catches his eye before he can take the first sip and nods subtly up the staircase, letting Ciri run off to the room in the back that’s been made up for her these days and get cleaned up on her own. Geralt takes a moment, stares down into the shallow glass, and shoots it all back in one toss before about-facing and following Yennefer upstairs to her quarters.

Once behind closed doors, surrounded by the comforting scent of lilac and gooseberry perfume, Geralt feels tension slide off his shoulders like a sack of grain he’s been hauling for lord knows how long.

“Where did you manage to find that peacock?” Yen looks amused, tickled by the whole situation downstairs. Geralt wishes he had the good humor for even an ounce of that levity in his own guts.

“Dehydratin’ by the river. What was I supposed to do, leave him there?”

Yen gives a gentle sniff of a chuckle, watches Geralt as though he’s doing something funny instead of just standing there in the middle of her room, boots and holster and all. “You’ve always been soft,” she hums, “for pretty people.”

Geralt glowers at her. “I’m not  _ soft. _ He needed help, and all he had on him was a fuckin’ guitar.”

Shushing him softly, Yennefer takes his hand and sits herself down on the edge of her bed. “Fine,” she relents. She pauses, studying the cracked-dirt sinew of his hands and running her fingertips softly across their edges. Geralt feels himself stir below his belt. “Did you miss me?”

“I always miss you,” Geralt murmurs. He slips his thumb up to catch her fingers between his own, marveling gently at how light they are in his grip when such fearsome power runs through her body—he’s seen it in action out there in the desert against bands of desperados, he knows it all too well.

“See?” Yen’s voice is sly, and Geralt looks up at her laughing eyes to see them a-shine with triumph. “Soft.”

Geralt scoffs. “Did you bring me up here just to call me names?”

Still amused with herself, Yennefer shakes her head and idly fixes a lock of hair that’s come undone from the twist of her combs and pins. “No, not entirely. It’s been a while since I saw you last, Philippa told me you passed through last week.”

Yen has begun pulling Geralt’s hand over her bodice, dragging his fingers gently across the gap between the fabric and her skin, and Geralt tries not to let his mind trail back to his last visit to The Lodge with that grand stumble of a romp with Triss. “You were busy,” he manages to say, his eyes fixed on the sight of his hand against Yen’s decolletage, “with a customer.”

“I was,” Yen says softly, a purr of a thing, and she pulls her skirts back from the front hem to move Geralt’s hand down to the hallowed vee between her legs. Geralt feels warmth and wet, the silk-soft of it, and smells arousal spark hard through the air around them. “But right now, I’m free as a bird.”

She takes him then, a devourment of a thing; lets Geralt strip her naked as though worshipping the only thing worth prayer in the goddamn world, unbuckles Geralt’s holster and throws open his belt to draw him out, guides Geralt down onto his back and lowers herself onto him to bless his whole body with an oblation of sweet nectar from every inch of her body—it’s divine. Geralt drowns in it, the freedom of release alongside the woman who’s seen more sides of him than he would let anyone know in the whole of Texas, and feels refueled with a certain lightness when he stretches back in the toss of the bedcovers with the first drag on a fresh cigarrillo and naked as the day he was made.

“Remind me why you’re takin’ Ciri east again?”

Yen looks up from her place in front of the tall, scrimmy mirror across from the foot of the bed, furrowing her brow at Geralt through the mirror as she runs the damp cloth from the washbasin between her legs. “You said it yourself, the theurgist gathering.”

Geralt returns her look flatly. Yennefer rolls her eyes and shakes her head but gives in; “She’s got something special in her, I’ve told you this before.”

Taken by the buoyancy of a broken dry spell, a rare smile takes up the corner of Geralt’s mouth. “Hence why I asked you to ‘remind me.’”

Pleasant exasperation rolls through Yen’s expression. She squeezes the cloth out into the wash basin, wets it again in the water, and swipes it under her arms next. “All the theurgists will be there,” she says steadily, as though reciting lessons to Ciri there in the sitting room over one of the massive tomes drawn out from Philippa’s office. “It’s an island off the Chesapeake, the oldest holy site we have here. One of the folks there is bound to know better than me or Triss how to handle what Ciri’s got burning in that little heart of hers.”

Geralt blows a thin stream of smoke up into the air and frowns faintly at a crow that barks a scratchy little song from somewhere outside the open window to his right. “I tell you every time we talk about this, Yen,  _ I’m _ teachin’ her how to protect herself.”

“And we’re teaching her how to  _ handle _ herself, Geralt. She needs both skills if she wants to stay safe out there.” Yen drapes the washcloth over the edge of the basin and comes back to stand beside the bed, arms akimbo and still naked as glory itself. Geralt rolls the tip of his tongue over his bottom lip as he takes his time looking at the soft thatch of hair between her legs at eye level before Yen cocks her head and pulls his attention back up to her face. “You know better than anyone the type of folk who would see her sold to a slaver, or worse, at the drop of a goddamn hat.”

Reluctantly humbled, Geralt takes one last deep pull on the cigarrillo before passing it to Yen. “Yeah, I know. You’re right.”

Yennefer takes her own deep drag on the smoke before scrubbing it out on the windowsill. She folds herself into a sit beside Geralt, her eyes lighting up with mischief which Geralt wants to both lose his sanity in and run bodily away from. “I’m always right. Now tell me about this ruffled songbird you found along the Rio.”


End file.
